Booker's day of the giant killers

It was, said chair of judges John Carey, "the year of David, not Goliath." The announcement of the Booker longlist had been called the "day of the long knives" for established writers; today the purge was almost completed as Martin Amis, JM Coetzee, Melvyn Bragg and Graham Swift were booted out in favour of first-time novelists Monica Ali, DBC Pierre and Clare Morrall.

The only big name left was Margaret Atwood, who was swiftly chosen as the favourite to win by bookmakers William Hill. Oryx and Crake is her 11th novel and her fourth to be nominated for the Booker; she won the prize in 2000 for Alias Grace. Carey described her book, about a world destroyed by science, consumerism and inequality, as "on a level with Orwell's 1984 and Huxley's Brave New World."

Monica Ali, Ladbrokes's favourite, was shortlisted for her first novel, the bestselling Brick Lane. It tells of a young woman's move from Bangladesh to the East End of London after an arranged marriage and garnered Ali a place on the Granta list of best young novelists even before publication.

DBC Pierre's debut, Vernon God Little, has also been the subject of rave reviews, in addition to winning the PG Wodehouse prize and being longlisted for the Guardian First Book award. Described by Carey as a "thrilling novel" which was "remarkable for its exhilarating, often highly poetic, language", it is narrated by a 15-year-old Texan boy who is wrongly convicted of murder after a high school massacre.

The third first-timer was Clare Morrall, whose Astonishing Splashes of Colour takes on the subject of childlessness through the eyes of a woman who loses her baby soon after its birth and descends into a spiral of obsession and gradual insanity. The judges praised Morrall for taking on a huge subject with "no touch of sentimentality". Morrall is published by a tiny, Birmingham-based press.

Zoe Heller's second novel, Notes on a Scandal, relates a teacher's affair with a pupil through the eyes of her friend. Compared to Austen by the judges for its focus on the private sphere and its satirical edge, Heller was singled out by Carey for "beautiful writing that doesn't put a foot wrong."

South African Damon Galgut was the wild card of the shortlist with The Good Doctor, which has yet to be published. It is a metaphysical thriller, described by the judges as being in the tradition of Graham Greene or Joseph Conrad.

Carey denied that the inclusion of an unprecedented number of women authors, in addition to the debut novelists, was a deliberate attempt to steer the Booker in a new direction, insisting that each book was there on the basis of merit.

He did, however, concede that there had been a shift towards novels with a strong narrative. While praising Coetzee's Elizabeth Costello for being a "novel of ideas", he pointed out that it had "less of a storyline" than any of the other shortlisted books and this had been a factor against its selection.

In another snub to the literary big-hitters, he added that Martin Amis's highly-fancied Yellow Dog had been a "contentious" inclusion in the longlist, and that there was not a single book on the shortlist that any of the judges believed should have been left off in his favour.